A foraging dinner at Topsy Farms

If you’re really lucky in life, you will be blessed with many beautiful food memories.

Behind the food memories, there is always love: that most essential of ingredients for good eating. It might not be the kind of love you expected. Instead it might be a love of exquisite ingredients or of humble food prepared with an abundance of care. Or rarest of all, a meal where both humble and exquisite ingredients are prepared with an extraordinary degree of skill and love, where the result is an explosion of tastes, a symmetry of flavours, a kind of magic that temporarily transforms the world and then lingers long after in the memory.

This is what I’m thinking about as I head to Topsy Farms on Amherst Island for a day of foraging, a picnic lunch in the woods, and later, a five-course dinner made almost entirely of food found or grown on the farm. In the late autumn sunshine, under a clear blue sky, I feel myself sliding into another state. That curiously exhilarating sense that comes with leaving the mainland and heading out to the islands – a thing that only those of us lucky enough to live amongst the waterways know.

I join the other foragers in time for a forest lunch of curried squash soup, homemade bread, and lamb and sumac stuffed milkweed pods, all cooked on the fire, before we head out across the land in search of mushrooms and puffballs and other wild edibles.

The light is dappled here in the hardwood forest on this lovely, cared-for farm. And like the Hundred Acre Woods, this forest has a grass floor, littered here and there with leaves and fallen trees, the odd animal scat, and a few garter snakes catching the last warmth of the season. For the next four hours, we tromp through the woods, led by chef Ruthie Cummings, who knows a thing or two about foraging. We are gathering mushrooms, looking them up and cross-checking in two different field guides, learning about spore prints, an important diagnostic tool for identifying mushrooms, and learning which mushrooms to avoid.

At first, the mushrooms are hard to find, but as our senses acclimatize, they become obvious. The lovely, chubby indigo mushrooms, identifiable by their purple colour, are apparently safe, tasty and easiest of all to recognize as soon as we’ve spotted them once.

Chef Ruthie can see puffballs far off in the distance. Everywhere we walk, she turns something over, shows us something new. “That’s wood ear,” she says. And here is wild ginger. There is wild mustard. Moments later, she’s on the ground reaching under a dead tree, showing us bear’s tooth mushrooms, a mass of whitish, fleshy matter that looks like sponge or a soft coral. As odd as it looks, it is amongst the safest of all mushrooms.

The afternoon nearly gone, the light fading, and with our baskets and bags full, we head back to the farmhouse and ready ourselves for dinner. We start with cocktails around the fire while Chef Ruthie tends to the dinner, all of it cooked outdoors, over the fire.

Ruthie first learned to forage, like she learned to cook, butcher and make sausages: by watching her German mother. She is a Red Seal trained chef, a sommelier, and a former Toronto restaurant owner who returned to Kingston three years ago to care for her elderly parents. Recently she has joined forces with Topsy Farms to create land-to-table food experiences. It’s a perfect combination – a thriving farm, the land and a forager chef.

As the sun goes down, we head into Topsy Farm’s fabulous Mongolian yurt to a candlelit table set for a formal dinner, complete with white tablecloths and crystal glasses. Starting with a smoked trout poke served on a bed of pureed mallow nut greens, we progress through four more courses, two palate cleansers, and a large loaf of homemade, fire-cooked sourdough bread served with truffle butter. Each course is accompanied by perfectly paired wines. Those of us driving sip small, sublime tastes.

There are wild mushroom duxelles made with the mushrooms we gathered; an exquisite lamb terrine with candied black walnuts and a rowan berry compote (all from the farm); and finally, venison wellington with smoked late harvest ramps. The venison has been marinating for two months in olive oil. The meat yields to the knife, melts on the tongue, is smooth, succulent, seductive. Ambrosial. One of the most delicious things I’ve ever tasted.

Eventually, long into the evening, we come to dessert: crepes stuffed with chestnut butter on creme fraiche with crystallized wild flowers. Every. Bite. Divine.

On the dark ferry ride home under a slim crescent moon, I’m remembering the tastes – thinking about the place, the space, the lambs in the farm fields, the forest. About the fundamental connections between land, people and food. About the sheer joy around the table. And thinking about a world where we might all be so fortunate as to measure our lives in such beautiful food memories.

For more information, visit Topsy Farms online at topsyfarms.com.

Lindy Mechefske is the author of Out of Old Ontario Kitchens (2018), award-winning Sir John’s Table, and A Taste of Wintergreen. Find or contact her at lindymechefske.com.